In Bush Memoir, Policy Intersects With Personality

George W. Bush’s memoir “Decision Points” could well have been titled “The Decider Decides”: it’s an autobiography focused around “the most consequential decisions” of his presidency and his personal life from his decision to give up drinking in 1986 to his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to his decisions regarding the financial crisis of 2008. It is a book that is part spin, part mea culpa, part family scrapbook, part self-conscious effort to (re)shape his political legacy.

A dogged work of reminiscence by an author not naturally given to introspection, “Decision Points” lacks the emotional precision and evocative power of his wife Laura’s book, “Spoken From the Heart,” published earlier this year, though it’s a considerably more substantial effort than Mr. Bush’s perfunctory 1999 campaign memoir, “A Charge to Keep.”

Certainly it’s the most casual of presidential memoirs: how many works in the genre start as a sort of evangelical, 12-step confession (“Could I continue to grow closer to the Almighty or was alcohol becoming my god?”), include some off-color jokes and conclude with an aside about dog poop?

The prose in “Decision Points” is utilitarian, the language staccato and blunt. Mr. Bush’s default mode is regular-guy-politico, and his moods vacillate mainly among the defensive and the diligent — frat boy irreverence, religious certainty and almost willful obliviousness.

The Bush who emerges from these pages will be highly familiar to readers of Bob Woodward’s quartet of books on the administration or Robert Draper’s 2007 “Dead Certain”: a president fond of big ideas and small comforts (like a daily run); a chief executive known for his optimism, stubbornness and lack of curiosity. At the same time “Decision Points” — sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently — gives the reader an uncanny sense of how personality and the fateful interplay of personalities within an administration can affect policies that affect the world.

Along the way Mr. Bush acknowledges various mistakes. On his administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina he says, “As leader of the federal government, I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster.” On Iraq he says he regrets that “we did not respond more quickly or aggressively when the security situation started to deteriorate after Saddam’s regime fell,” that “cutting troop levels too quickly was the most important failure of execution in the war,” and that he still has “a sickening feeling every time” he thinks about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Still, he insists that “removing Saddam from power was the right decision”: “for all the difficulties that followed, America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD and supporting terror at the heart of the Middle East.”

In the course of this book Mr. Bush hops and skips over many serious issues raised by critics, including the cherry-picking of intelligence by administration hawks in the walk up to the invasion of Iraq; the push for aggrandized executive power by the White House in the war on terror; and the ignoring of advice from the military and the State Department on troop levels and postwar planning.

The former president does not address the role that the decision to divert resources to the war in Iraq played in the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, instead arguing that “the multilateral approach to rebuilding, hailed by so many in the international community, was failing.” He tries to play down the problems of Guantánamo Bay, writing that detainees were given “a personal copy of the Koran” and access to a library among whose popular offerings was “an Arabic translation of ‘Harry Potter.’ ” And he asserts that “had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked.”

Mr. Bush does not grapple with the role that his deregulatory, free market policies played in fueling the economic meltdown at the end of his second term. Nor does he take any responsibility for the fierce partisanship and political divisiveness that took root in his administration.

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Jake Guevara/The New York Times

Several times in the book Mr. Bush uses the term “blindsided” to describe his feelings about a crisis that his advisers and cabinet seem not to have filled him in on. He says he felt “blindsided” over Abu Ghraib: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “had told me the military was investigating reports of abuse at the prison, but I had no idea how graphic or grotesque the photos would be,” he writes. “The first time I saw them was the day they were aired on ‘60 Minutes II.’ ”

Mr. Bush says he told advisers he “never wanted to be blindsided like that again,” after a showdown between the White House and the Justice Department over a secret surveillance program. And he says “we were blindsided by a financial crisis that had been more than a decade in the making”: his focus, he writes, “had been kitchen-table economic issues like jobs and inflation. I assumed any major credit troubles would have been flagged by the regulators or rating agencies.”

Many books by reporters and former insiders have delineated the Bush administration as given to improvisatory decision making, wary of the traditional processes of policy review and inclined to favor loyalty over expertise. In “The Assassins’ Gate,” the New Yorker writer George Packer quoted Richard N. Haass, a former director of policy planning in the State Department, saying that a real weighing of pros and cons about the Iraq war never took place. And in “The Next Attack” Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that planning efforts for the war were often not coordinated, that many officials were working out of channels, “issuing directives without ever having their plans scrubbed in the kind of tedious, iterative process that the government typically uses to make sure it is ready for any contingency.”

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In many respects this volume ratifies such observations. Mr. Bush, famous for being a “gut player,” writes that in assessing candidates for administration jobs, he looked at “character and personality” in an effort to create a culture that “fostered loyalty — not to me, but to the country and our ideals.” In 2006 an aide told him that “several people had spontaneously used the same unflattering term to describe the White House structure,” he writes. “It started with ‘cluster’ and ended with four more letters.” And he writes about “squabbling within the national security team” and how “nothing worked” to cool these turf battles, including his own talks with Mr. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney and the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Despite the eagerness of Mr. Bush to portray himself as a forward-leaning, resolute leader, this volume sometimes has the effect of showing the former president as both oddly passive and strangely cavalier.

For instance Mr. Bush writes about the failures to contain deteriorating security conditions in Iraq, continuing fights between the Pentagon and State Department, and his frustrations with Mr. Rumsfeld. But while he says that he had “planned to make a change at Defense as part of a new national security team” in 2004, he adds that he simply couldn’t come up with a replacement for Mr. Rumsfeld. He considered and rejected the ideas of putting Ms. Rice or Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the job, and was rebuffed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who “was enjoying his retirement.”

The situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate over the next two years with more and more soldiers and civilians getting killed and wounded, and in the spring of 2006 a group of retired generals spoke out against Mr. Rumsfeld. “While I was still considering a personnel change,” Mr. Bush writes, “there was no way I was going to let a group of retired officers bully me into pushing out the civilian secretary of defense. It would have looked like a military coup and would have set a disastrous precedent.”

And so Mr. Rumsfeld stayed on in the job until an old friend of Mr. Bush’s from high school and college (whom he had appointed to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board) suggested Robert M. Gates as a replacement. “Why hadn’t I thought of Bob?” Mr. Bush wonders.

Mr. Bush’s portrait of Mr. Cheney reaffirms many reporters’ depiction of him as a steamrolling force for military intervention in Iraq. And Mr. Bush’s description of the momentum toward war echoes that found in Mr. Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack,” in which there was building pressure for action: Mr. Bush says that the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, told him “the uncertainty was hurting the economy,” and that Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia told him “the Middle East wanted a decision.”

But while many books like “The Bushes” by Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer and “The Bush Tragedy” by Jacob Weisberg have emphasized the differences between George W. Bush and his father — and No. 43’s need to differentiate himself from No. 41 — the younger Bush takes pains in this memoir to underscore his closeness with his dad.

He says that during family Christmas celebrations in 2002 his father said: “You know how tough war is, son, and you’ve got to try everything you can to avoid war,” and then added, “But if the man won’t comply, you don’t have any other choice.” Later, after Bush the Younger gave the order to go to war, he says that his father sent him a note saying: “You are doing the right thing. Your decision, just made, is the toughest decision you’ve had to make up until now. But you made it with strength and with compassion.”

Mr. Bush says he left office satisfied that “I had always done what I believed was right.” Since then, he says, he’s comfortably settled back into ordinary life. Shortly after moving to Dallas, he writes, he took his dog Barney for an early morning walk: “Barney spotted our neighbor’s lawn, where he promptly took care of his business. There I was, the former president of the United States, with a plastic bag on my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for the past eight years.”

DECISION POINTS

By George W. Bush

Illustrated. 497 pages. Crown Publishers. $35.

A version of this review appears in print on November 4, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Personality Intersects With Policy. Today's Paper|Subscribe